ARTIST NEWS

A Whirlwind Named Barenboim

REHEARSING the Berlin Staatskapelle the other afternoon, Daniel Barenboim froze for an instant, baton absently pointed skyward. He shook his head. “More mysterious,” he said to the clarinets, returning from his brief trance. Then he drew a yellow towel briskly over his flushed face and in the same motion glanced discreetly at a clock on the wall. The Staatskapelle, the orchestra of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, resumed. Mr. Barenboim scanned the room as if to locate the sound he wanted, mouth slightly ajar, expression rapt and intense. Finally he nodded, content with the passage. “Wunderbar, wunderbar,” he muttered, a man in a hurry.

Mr. Barenboim, an Argentine-born Israeli who has made his life here, arrives in New York this week for a variety of performances that coincide with the publication of “Music Quickens Time” (Verso Books), a collection of his essays and occasional pieces on music, Israel, himself and other musicians. In America it’s a typical Barenboim whirlwind schedule. He will make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera conducting “Tristan und Isolde,” play the first piano recital there since Vladimir Horowitz’s during the 1970s and join several young musicians and James Levine in a chamber concert at Weill Recital Hall.

He will also perform with members of the West-Eastern Divan — the much-lauded orchestra of young Arabs and Israelis that he established in 1999 with Edward Said, the Palestinian-born literary scholar — in another chamber concert at the United Nations. There are trips to Philadelphia and Chicago.

Oh yes, and he plays the premiere of “Interventions,” a new piano concerto by Elliott Carter, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Levine at Carnegie Hall on the occasion of Mr. Carter’s centenary. Asked recently whether, like so much of Mr. Carter’s work, this one was difficult to learn, the sort of music most pianists want months to prepare, Mr. Barenboim paused. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I haven’t had much time to look yet.”

There is no one quite like him today in the music world. General music director of the Staatsoper here; principal guest conductor at the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan; former music director of the Chicago Symphony and the Orchestre de Paris; for years a conductor at the Bayreuth festival; a champion of new music since the 1950s; a chamber musician who has performed with every great singer and instrumentalist in half a century — from Gregor Piatigorsky and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to his wife, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who died in 1987, and the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff — he was a child prodigy who remains, despite a full-time conducting career, among the premiere pianists.

His fellow pianist Emanuel Ax, when the subject of Mr. Barenboim came up in a recent e-mail exchange, volunteered that he had looked up to Mr. Barenboim since the age of 16, notwithstanding that Mr. Barenboim is only seven years older. “I thought then and still do that he is one of the great players of our time,” Mr. Ax wrote, “and when he is in shape I would rather hear him, with Beethoven especially, than almost anyone. Obviously, he is a major conductor — in short, life is unfair!”

It’s true, that slight remark about being “in shape.” Mr. Barenboim, his seemingly effortless virtuosity aside, drops a few notes sometimes, having always so many of them to keep in mind at once. That said, as a player in the Berlin Philharmonic commented the other day, shaking his head, even the notes Mr. Barenboim makes up or fudges end up being interesting.

Critics fishing for complaints also occasionally say that he conducts at extreme tempos. Leading the Divan in the West bank town of Ramallah a few years ago, a special triumph for the orchestra because it brought young Israelis into the Occupied Territories alongside Palestinians to make music (Arte television recorded it), Mr. Barenboim rushed hellbent through the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at a tempo the players couldn’t quite dash off. But the effort brought down the house. His “Tristan” at La Scala last season was sublimely, ethereally slow. What really matters in the end, he is forever making old works sound new.

He performed Schubert’s song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin” with Mr. Quasthoff on a recent Sunday to a packed Staatsoper, and in the prolonged silence before nearly 2,000 people erupted into applause, there were only the muffled hints of weeping throughout the hall. Mr. Quasthoff ended the curtain calls by pointing out that Mr. Barenboim had to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” in the same hall a couple of hours later.

Afterward Mr. Quasthoff reported in conversation that Mr. Barenboim hadn’t wished to rehearse. He said he knew what Mr. Quasthoff wanted. Still, “every song he played had four or five notes that were like a complete revelation to me, that made me hear the music as if for the first time,” Mr. Quasthoff said, “and this is always how it is with him.” A musician can hardly pay a bigger compliment to a colleague.

At 66 Mr. Barenboim has been performing for 58 years, nearly since the days of the first commercially successful LPs. Barrel-chested, quick-witted, a headstrong live wire and easy raconteur with a big ego and a small, stocky pair of hands, he recalls, as if he were from another era, how Wilhelm Furtwängler recommended him to George Szell and Karl Böhm; how Horowitz invited him to dish dirt about Arthur Rubinstein (Mr. Barenboim, who revered Rubinstein, instead tormented Horowitz by saying wonderful things about Rubinstein’s playing); how the pianist Edwin Fischer, conducting Mozart from the keyboard in the early 1950s, inspired Mr. Barenboim to think of picking up a baton (he wasn’t yet a teenager); how Rubinstein and Furtwängler both established a model to which he aspired as an artist.

“Those two still represent for me what a musician should be, meaning not just someone musically accomplished but cultured and well read,” Mr. Barenboim said late one evening at home, puffing on a big Cuban cigar. He was ensconced in an easy chair in his living room in the leafy Berlin neighborhood of Zehlendorf, seated before a pair of immense Steinways, one fitted with the narrower keys that he likes to use in recitals these days. The bookshelves behind him bulged with volumes in French, Spanish, German, English and Hebrew.

“Rubinstein read Cervantes in Spanish, Dostoyevsky in Russian, Voltaire in French,” Mr. Barenboim said. “Music has become specialized today. There used to be a different notion of musical culture. I believe that Furtwängler genuinely felt — maybe he was naïve, but he felt that he personally could save German culture from the Nazis. He wrote about the introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in relation to the Greek idea of chaos and catharsis. How many musicians think that way today?

“A century ago the same people who knew Schoenberg’s music knew Kandinsky’s art. There was no separation. Rubinstein used to say that at the turn of the century 25 percent of the audience played the music he was playing, and 70 years later 25 people in the audience owned his records. The responsibility is ours. It’s not the fault of technology. The person who wants to listen actively will get more out of the music than the person who just sits there waiting to be inspired.”

Along these same lines he includes a tribute to the composer Pierre Boulez in the new book, recalling how Mr. Boulez dismissed Bruckner’s music during the 1970s, then a decade later, showing “his greatness and intelligence,” embraced Bruckner. That “is a wonderful lesson for us,” Mr. Barenboim concluded, “because often there are people who have very clear ideas and causes to fight for, and they hold on to them and are immovable. And that is very courageous and very laudable, actually. But there’s one step higher than that.”

The metaphor is plain: in this, as in his references to Furtwängler and Rubinstein having a sense of the larger world beyond music, Mr. Barenboim is talking about himself and his efforts, from the bully pulpit of the concert stage, to help assuage at least a little of the hatred between many Israelis and Palestinians and move toward a state of peace.

“The idea was to give each person a forum to articulate his or her thoughts and beliefs in front of the other,” he recounted about the origins of the West-Eastern Divan. “I grew up in Israel in the ’50s, when it was not an occupying power. With CNN and Al-Jazeera today, it’s easy to forget that we could be totally unaware then of the story of the Palestinians. We told ourselves that either the Palestinians had left because they wanted to leave, or they were encouraged to leave by other Arabs. I don’t think I met a Palestinian growing up. I was a patriot. Then I remember in September 1970, when King Hussein killed a lot of Palestinians, Golda Meir saying: ‘Who are these Palestinian people? We are the people of Palestine.’ And for the first time I thought to myself, that can’t be right.”

Gradually he began to hear from Arab acquaintances and others what he calls “the Palestinian narrative.” The creation of the Divan, bringing together young Jews and Arabs with conflicting narratives, and not a little distrust of each other, promised harmony if only on the common ground of music. Needless to say, Mr. Barenboim made enemies back home.

“I don’t think I only have detractors in Israel,” he insisted. “When I play a recital, the place is packed. But I simply think we must ask how we got in this situation of hopelessness. We are a powerful, sovereign nation since 1948. I’m not naïve. I know most Arabs don’t see a reason for Israel to exist as a Jewish state. But in the last 20 years many have come to the conclusion that they need to make some accommodation. Meanwhile this is not the Israel I grew up with.”

He repeated what he often says: “The Divan is deeply nonpolitical in the end. In other words, it’s not in any way linked to the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. If we all end up killing each other in the Middle East, then we at the Divan would have had 10 years of a beautiful experience. Or else this is 10 years of preparing for a beautiful situation. Either way, it’s worthwhile.”

The other evening, after his recital with Mr. Quasthoff and the “Onegin” performance, over leftovers at the kitchen table, having just finished coaching Karim Said, a young Palestinian protégé, Mr. Barenboim looked not the slightest fatigued. He shrugged.

“I don’t feel I have an abnormal schedule,” he said. “What would I have done without the recital yesterday? I would have gotten up at 10 instead of 9:30. I would have played the piano here at home instead of there. I have a card in my favor, which is the ability to concentrate. The act of mental preparation didn’t ever exist for me. As a child I used to play soccer, shower, then play a concert.”

A couple of mornings later he was walking briskly through the backstage canteen at the Philharmonie. He greeted the kitchen staff members like old friends and joked with the tuba player of the Berlin Philharmonic, who at that moment was at the counter contemplating a sweet pastry; and at 11 on the dot he arrived, through a maze of hallways, at the door of the borrowed studio of the Philharmonic’s music director, Simon Rattle. Inside, a string quartet and a page turner waited. Mr. Barenboim tore into the Shostakovich Piano Quintet without so much as touching the keyboard to warm up first, and for the next hour or so focused as if otherwise lost to the world.

In his book he writes, “When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death.” He adds, “Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”

During the Shostakovich rehearsal he bantered with the quartet; offered the first violinist a tip on bowing, the cellist a suggestion about delaying a crescendo; assented to a turn of phrase that a couple of the string players proposed. At one point the same expression of frozen concentration, the one he had standing before the orchestra, flashed across his face. So it became clear. That’s what it was.